The subject of this Paper has the same profound interest for me at the present moment as it had when I was first collecting the terrible evidence out of which, as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of reason could not help shaping the truth it involved.  It is not merely on account of the bearing of the question,—­if there is a question,—­on all that is most sacred in human life and happiness, that the subject cannot lose its interest.  It is because it seems evident that a fair statement of the facts must produce its proper influence on a very large proportion of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds.  Individuals may, here and there, resist the practical bearing of the evidence on their own feelings or interests; some may fail to see its meaning, as some persons may be found who cannot tell red from green; but I cannot doubt that most readers will be satisfied and convinced, to loathing, long before they have finished the dark obituary calendar laid before them.

I do not know that I shall ever again have so good an opportunity of being useful as was granted me by the raising of the question which produced this Essay.  For I have abundant evidence that it has made many practitioners more cautious in their relations with puerperal females, and I have no doubt it will do so still, if it has a chance of being read, though it should call out a hundred counterblasts, proving to the satisfaction of their authors that it proved nothing.  And for my part, I had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned by her attendant, than claim to have saved forty out of fifty patients to whom I had carried the disease.  Thus, I am willing to avail myself of any hint coming from without to offer this paper once more to the press.  The occasion has presented itself, as will be seen, in a convenient if not in a flattering form.

I send this Essay again to the medical profession, without the change of a word or syllable.  I find, on reviewing it, that it anticipates and eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be entertained for a moment until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled.  In its very statement of the doctrine maintained it avoids all discussion of the nature of the disease “known as puerperal fever,” and all the somewhat stale philology of the word contagion.  It mentions, fairly enough, the names of sceptics, or unbelievers as to the reality of personal transmission; of Dewees, of Tonnelle, of Duges, of Baudelocque, and others; of course, not including those whose works were then unwritten or unpublished; nor enumerating all the Continental writers who, in ignorance of the great mass of evidence accumulated by British practitioners, could hardly be called well informed on this subject.  It meets all the array of negative cases,—­those in which disease did not follow exposure,—­by the striking example of small-pox, which, although one of the most contagious of diseases, is subject to the most remarkable